The Year in Transportation

2010 will go down in history as the year the electric car returned to the mainstream, barely.

Nissan, General Motors, Think, Fisker Automotive and others months ago unfurled grand plans to bring plug-in hybrids and all electrics to market this year. The cars are coming. They’re just a little late and light in numbers.

A few Chevy Volts and Nissan Leafs will trickle into the market in December. Fisker, meanwhile, delayed the Karma until March 2011, while Coda punted from late 2010 to the third quarter of 2011. Think will bring its City to the U.S. this year, but only sell it to fleet customers: consumers won’t be able to get their hands on them until 2011.

Nonetheless, the momentum for electric cars, and even biofuels, continues to grow. Here are the top stories from the year.

1. The Big Electric Dividing Line. Established manufacturers in the last twelve months have shown why it will be tough to compete with them.

Side note: expect more ethanol, too, with the EPA raising the blend standard from 10 percent to 15 percent.

3. The Collateral CAFE Industry

A host of startups -- Scuderi, EcoMotors, Achates Power, Transonic Combustion, WrightSpeed, Nanostellar, PowerGenix, etc. -- hope to capitalize on the calendar crunch imposed by the new CAFE standards by licensing their technologies for energy efficient engines and other components to major car makers. It won’t be easy. Car makers are incredibly reluctant to license, but in many cases they may not have a choice.

Big companies, of course, will get in on the act, too. Panasonic has developed a car air conditioner that runs on engine waste heat while Freescale and others have developed capacitors for acceleration in gas cars.

4. Better Place Raises More Money Amid Debates About its Future

Back in 2008, most stories about Better Place read like a Superman comic book. A leader (Shai Agassi) comes from a long, long way away (Israel, SAP) to help us fight an enemy (oil) with amazing super powers (a business model for selling electric cars with swappable batteries like cell phones). Rare critical stories are usually met with caustic comments.

The charismatic force field has taken a few hits. Although Renault Nissan has agreed to make cars with swappable batteries for Denmark and Israel, most other car makers right now say they don’t have plans for swapping: even Tesla, which once talked about a swappable battery in one model of the Model S, has downplayed it. Almost none of the electrics coming to the U.S. tout a swappable battery. Go to an industry conference and everyone has a Better Place opinion.

Still, don’t count the company out. At the start of the year, it raised $350 million more, bringing the total to $700 million. It also has alliances with General Electric, and Intel, among others, will become a customer for the cars in Israel when they start to come out in the second half of 2011.

These shifts in the market will likely lead to a quicker rollout of the electric car infrastructure, but it certainly will make it far more difficult for startups to survive. Think of it: who are you going to buy high-powered electrical equipment that could fry a consumer from -- a startup or a company that’s been around for 100 years?

6. The IPO Market: You Can’t Win Them All

Transportation has been one of the principal themes of green IPOs, and it’s worked about half of the time. Battery Maker A123 Systems went public in late 2009. The stock jumped from $13.50 to over $20. Since then, it has seen large customer Black & Decker fade away, and in the most recent quarter, battery shipments shrunk. A123’s stock now sells for $7.90.

Not everyone is underwater. Tesla went public, but then dipped below its IPO price in the summer. Since then it has rebounded on the strength of a deal with Toyota, a new factory and Wall Street analyst reports containing optimistic expectations that may have been fashioned after guzzling a quart of bong water.

Amyris, another biofuel maker, went out at $16 and now sells for $20, or about where Amyris wanted to start out in the first place. And let’s not forget Molycorp. It wants to mine rare earth minerals in California. The stock has zoomed from $13 to over $30 in recent weeks because of fears about China crimping supplies of these materials, which are crucial for electric motors.

7. Will China Own the Car Market?

Japanese and South Korean car brands have long been fixtures in international markets. Soon, China may join the mix. BYD, which started making cars in 2003, has laid out plans to become the largest car maker in China by 2015 and the largest in the world by 2025. It already makes electrics, hybrids, buses and gas cars. A buoyant domestic market, ideally, will pave the way for sales in India, Latin America and ultimately Europe and the U.S.

The central government has also made electric transportation a high priority.

It won’t be easy. Coda Automotive, a Sino-U.S. company, had to delay its cars, and early ride-n-drives weren’t exactly overly enthusiastic. Style, fit and finish aren’t easy to master -- it took Hyundai years. Nonetheless, Chinese companies have shown they can adapt fast.

Zeachem and Aurora, meanwhile, branched out into, respectively, green chemicals and food additives in the meantime.

10. High Speed Rail in the U.S.?

It’s weird to think that one of the big political issues of the day is whether the U.S. will begin to adopt a technology pioneered in Japan in the early 1960s. But high-speed rail appears to be gaining momentum in the U.S. California has given it a thumbs up and so has the Obama Administration. The question now is whether -- or when -- it gets built.